Quileute

PREFACE.

Quileute is spoken at present by 180 individuals at the mouth of
the Quileute river, on the northwestern coast of the state of
Washington. About 15 miles further south, at the mouth of the
Hoh river, there survive a few members of the Hoh tribe, whose
speech, according to several Quileute informants, differs only
slightly from theirs.

Quileute has always been affiliated with Chemakum, the language
once spoken in the same state near Port Townsend. The writer had
the opportunity of working for a few hours with the last survivor
of the Chemakum tribe, Luise Webster. A study of the material
collected previously by Professor Boas 1 , together with the scanty
data recorded on this occasion, confirms the close relationship
which has been claimed for these two languages. It must be remark-
ed, however, that even in the limited information available there is
a considerable proportion of unrelated words as well as some im-
portant grammatical differences. From the phonetic notes published
by Professor Boas, and so far as we may judge from our brief
contact with Chemakum, we may infer that the sounds of the two
languages are very similar. Among the most outstanding differences,
we may mention first, that the Chemakum m and n are replaced
by the Quileute b and d, respectively. The latter sounds do not
occur in Chemakum, and m, n are found in Quileute only when
quoting the speech of the mythologic giantess Da's-k'iya' \ Secondly,
the Chemakum vowels seem to be less variable than the Quileute,
and the tonal characteristics of the Quileute accent do not seem to
exist in Chemakum. At least, they were not found in a number of
Chemakum words decidedly cognate with those which present such
tonal characteristics in Quileute. Nor were such tonal features
found by Professor Boas in 1890, when Luise Webster must have
had a more vivid recollection of the language, as she still spoke it
occasionally with her brother. At the time of our acquaintance, this
informant had forgotten most of her language.

A cursory comparison with other languages of the north Pacific
coast discloses a number of significant points of contact between
Quileute and the Wakashan stock.

1 1 refer to his field notes, which he kindly placed at my disposal, as well as
to his "Notes on the Chemakum Language," in the American Anthropolo-
gist for January, 1892. I have also examined a Chemakum vocabulary
collected by Dr. Livingston Farrand.

Andrade, Manuel J. 1933. Quileute.
New York: Columbia University Press.